If you felt the ground move under your feet this month, you likely experienced the tectonic plates of Fargo's reckless incentive policy grinding to a halt. In a remarkable turn of events, both the Cass County Commission and the Fargo School Board independently delivered a resounding "no" to a large downtown subsidy, challenging the Fargo City Commission's intent to continue handing out decades-long incentives while blowing millions of dollars in the process.

The incentive at the center of this debate was a generous 15-year pilot stacked on top of a 5-year RZ incentive. Worth $700,000 a year, this giveaway was intended for a 262-unit apartment complex downtown. The proposal never truly made sense, morphing from "low income" housing to vaguely defined "workforce housing", whatever tha

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